Articles tagged with: review

Boards of Canada have always been one of ‘those’ bands for me. The kind of band you heard once at a club, and the track caught your attention enough to ask the DJ about, but never quite get around to really checking out.
On the occasions I’ve heard them, I’ve liked them but never got around to sinking myself into their discography. Back in the spring, I stumbled across their website and noticed they had a new album, called “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, due out soon. Even then, it wasn’t until a few …

Budweiser recently released the Red Light, a limited edition a wireless hockey goal light that’ll blast the horns and spin the lights when your favourite team(s) score a goal. It’s the perfect addition to any den or man cave inhabited by even casual hockey fans.

The Red Light has been such a hit for Bud that they’re now back ordered until May, and a brisk second hand market for them on Ebay with the kind of 200% to 300% markup you’d expect from a gizmo limited to Canada, leaving US hockey fans out in the cold. I was lucky enough to get one as an early birthday present from a friend…

Back in 2010, six French students won the GDC Student Showcase award for the liquid physics puzzle game Puddle. Konami later picked up the title, and after development by Neko Entertainment, Puddle was released on both the Xbox Live Arcade and PSN a couple of weeks back.
The premise of the game is straight forward. The player guides liquids through hazardous environments, while trying not to lose so much volume that you have to start over. In the early levels, this means navigating water through pipes filled with fire and heated surfaces …

Now over half way through its fourth season, it was announced that Breaking Bad will return for a fifth and final 16 episode season. If you’re not already watching what the fans call BrBa, I can’t recommend it highly enough, as it may be the single greatest piece of filmed entertainment ever.

Epic Games had to pull off a hat trick with the concluding chapter of Gears of War. First is to bring new visual and gameplay tweaks that are prerequisite for a sequel to be a hit with the fans. Second, they needed a way to recap the story for newcomers. Finally, they needed to wrap up the story in a way that is satisfying for a trilogy that was designed to end with the third installment.

Epic pulled it off with style and grace, as Gears of War 3 exemplifies exactly what a sequel should be.

As I do recall, the first time I set eyes on Twisted Pixel’s Kinect based game The Gunstringer I wasn’t rightly sure what to make of it. The odd little feller looked like a goofy western on-rails shooter aimed for the new-fangled Kinect. On first blush I reckoned I’d steer clear of it, but like my kin done told me, don’t judge a book by it’s cover.

Before we get into the meat of this game, I’d like to start with the lesson I most sincerely hope every other studio takes away from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. How to handle morality systems. Straight, DX:HR has the best morality system ever implemented in a game. It handles player choices in a way that is meaningful, powerful, and allows you to genuinely effect the way the game plays out. How does it do that?

If I had to categorize Child of Eden, it would be a “first person J-pop electronica visualizer science fiction dance rail shooter”. While that sounds like a disjointed mouthful, everything flows together seamlessly. Taking place in the same universe as Q Entertainment’s earlier Rez, Child of Eden ups the ante in all respects, making it a singular experience, that all but achieves designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s goal of inducing synesthesia in the player, delightfully crossing the wires between sound and vision.

Another universe, another copyfight. In Swap Thing 2, eloquently titled “Inception of The Social Network of Iron Men and Tron in 3D”, the Source once again finds himself doling out CDs for distribution in a world where analog may be your best bet…